by Lucía Jalón Oyarzun

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In those days, the 1970s, Canadian poets talked non-stop about place. Place was the sacred subject of poetry. The Haida poets, by contrast, never talked about place, but they lived and breathed it. Their work was immersed in the nonhuman world: the sea and the mountains, sea mammals and sea birds, beach rocks and beach weed and forest. What I needed to know in order to understand those poets was exactly what I wanted to know. It was what I needed to know in order to be where I was.